Cañon City Music & Blossom Festival

At one o’clock on the Saturday of the first full weekend in May, the Blossom Parade starts down Main Street in Cañon City. It runs west to east from Third Street to Fourteenth. Parking on Main closes at nine that morning, and spectators stake out curb spots along the route. The 88th parade, on May 2, 2026, carried the theme “Stars Over the Rockies,” chosen for the nation’s 250th anniversary and Colorado’s 150th. The Daily Record counted 104 floats, acts and bands, a record, led by parade marshal Adam Arnold. Construction was underway on Main that spring, and Blossom Board President Cassie Grow told the paper the parade would go on regardless. A year earlier Shirley Troutman rode as grand marshal and Washington Elementary School took first place in the Youth Division. The Blossom Festival Queen, Madysen Daniels, rode with her court: Olivia Ley, Bella Lloyd, and Jenna Cornwell as Miss Personality. “Our town and our visitors have always loved the parade because it showcases the heart and soul of our area,” Grow told The Gazette in 2018.

Bands in three halls

Many of the marchers are school bands that came to town to compete. The Daily Record calls the band competitions “perhaps the longest-held tradition of the festival,” and the festival calls itself host to the largest community-run school music competition in Colorado. For 2026, organizer Mike Nolan counted 55 schools entered and 25 registered to march. The contests fill the days before the parade in three buildings. Concert bands and orchestras play at the Lou Del Pizzo Performing Arts Center at Cañon City High School, where the 2026 performances began at 8:30 on Wednesday morning. Jazz bands play in the Florence High School Auditorium, and choirs sing at St. Michael’s Parish in Cañon City. Admission to all of them is free. In 2025 the Cañon City High School Encore Choir sang in the choir competition, the same year it won the state title in show choir.

Plaques go to the first three places in each category and class. Trophies go to drum majors, percussion, auxiliaries, soloists and sections. A sweepstakes award goes to the school that gathers the most points across the competitive categories. The festival’s site announces the 89th festival for May 2027.

Two parks on parade day

Food stands line the parade route and continue into Veterans Park: tacos, hamburgers, pizza, corn dogs, Polish sausages, caramel apples, snow cones and lemonade. After the parade the crowd moves to the park for Blossoms in the Park, the craft fair. The festival counts over 100 vendors; the Daily Record counted 130 in 2026. Booths open at nine both days and close at seven on Saturday and four on Sunday. The 2026 food list included Thai Pepper’s Monkey Balls, Squeeze Me Lemonade, 8yours2 Kettle Corn, Summertime Soft Serve, Cheese Love Grill, Lucky Mary’s and Donata’s Hot Dog Cart. The kids’ zone had face painting, a mechanical bull and, the paper reported, a mermaid’s lagoon. On the 2026 stage, the Fort Carson 4th Infantry Army Band played Saturday from nine, Yoga in the Park followed at eleven, and Catalyst Church held a service at nine on Sunday. The Daily Record advised bringing a lawn chair. A second craft fair, run by the Royal Gorge Chamber Alliance, sets up at Gateway Depot Plaza.

Saturday begins and ends at Centennial Park. The RunBlossom 5K starts there and follows the Arkansas Riverwalk Trail beside the river. The 2026 race went off at 7:45 a.m., and past years have drawn more than 800 runners. In the afternoon the park hosts Cluster Duck, the festival’s concert. In 2026 the gates opened at 3:30 p.m. Adults paid $7 plus $7 in drink tokens, and children 14 and under paid $3. The Rowdy Brass Band played at four, Six Bucks & A Flight at 5:30, and Breanna Nix, a top-three finisher on American Idol in 2025, at 7:45. Bounce houses from Gotta Bounce made up the first Cluster Duck kids’ zone.

At 8:30 that night the Stories in the Sky drone show rose over the park. The festival counted 500 drones, and the Daily Record described a fifteen-minute show with scenes from across Colorado, among them the Royal Gorge Bridge. Spectators could follow the music on a phone app. The show was one of nearly 150 in a statewide series for the two anniversaries. The festival names the America 250 - Colorado 150 Commission, the Colorado Tourism Office and Visit Denver as the series’ developers. In 2018, the year of the 80th festival and the theme “Dude, it’s the ‘80s,” Cluster Duck was held in Macon Plaza with a beer garden. Paramount, an ‘80s rock tribute band, played songs by Journey, Bon Jovi, Guns N’ Roses and Def Leppard.

The same weekend in 2026, the Cañon City Rodeo Association held the 153rd Royal Gorge Rodeo at its grounds on South Ninth Street on Saturday and Sunday evenings. Mutton bustin’ came first, followed by wild horse races, bronc riding, barrel racing and bull riding.

The carnival and the rest of the year

For many years a carnival stood on the grounds at Elm Avenue and South Ninth Street during Blossom weekend. The festival’s Hall of Fame inducted the Ring Family of Wright’s Amusement Company in 2018. Wright’s Amusements later declined to return, and the carnival went on hiatus in 2025 and stayed away in 2026. Board member Greg DiRito told the Daily Record that finding new ground and a new company was like trying to hit a moving target, and that a Fourth of July or Harvest Festival carnival might still be possible. In August 2026 a carnival did come back on its own dates. Amusement Midway Providers set up at the top of Ninth Street, 620 Elm Avenue, from August 13 to 16 for what the festival billed as the first Cañon City Carnival. Unlimited-ride wristbands cost $25 on opening night and $35 on the weekend. On the last day the festival’s Facebook page answered a rumor about the restrooms: there were 20 portable units on the grounds, not 4, and all were serviced daily.

A volunteer board under President Cassie Grow runs events through the rest of the year. The Blossom Ball, the festival’s biggest fundraiser, is a black-tie evening at The Annex on the Friday before the parade. It began in 2013 as the Blossom Alumni Banquet, and its 2026 theme was “Under the Bigtop.” “It’s really a beautiful, fun event that people always enjoy,” Grow said. The Blossom Ballers Bowling Tournament, nine-pin no-tap for mixed teams, drew more than 40 teams in 2025, according to co-organizer Matt Martinez. In 2026 it moved to September 26 at Cañon City Lanes. A Colorado Days craft fair filled Veterans Park in early August 2026. The Hall of Fame has inducted volunteers and supporters since 2014, with 2020 and 2021 entered on its list only as “COVID.” Among the 2022 honorees is Carie Canterbury, whose photographs of the 2025 parade ran in the Daily Record.

Fruit Day and the blossom fete

The festival’s own history comes from Larry Thomas Wood’s book Every Picture Tells a Story. Wood finds the first recorded mention of a festival in the town in the Canon City Times in the 1860s. By the 1880s residents were celebrating Fruit Day, both to mark their harvests and to introduce neighboring communities to their produce. In the 1890s the Fremont County Horticultural Society organized the one-day event, and as many as 10,000 visitors came, mostly by passenger train from Denver, Colorado Springs, La Junta and Rocky Ford. Every visitor received a paper plate of apples, plums, pears, peaches and grapes. Fruit was displayed in a 50-foot pavilion on Main Street and at the opera house. The Rocky Mountain News held that 16 tons were given away in 1894 alone.

Fruit Day had other attractions. As many as 5,000 people toured the Territorial Prison, and about as many walked the orchards of Rockafellow, Harrison, Catlin, Trout and others in Fruitmere, Orchard Park, Park Center and Lincoln Park. The town had few hotel rooms, so visitors stayed overnight in makeshift boarding houses and campgrounds. Around 1900 Fruit Day became May Day, and the emphasis shifted from harvest to blossom. The orchard tours moved to the start of the growing season. Wood writes that the fruit farmers and nurserymen had gotten the word out by then and were “disinclined to give away their products for nothing.”

It is believed that the word “blossom” entered the celebration in 1908. That May Day, Dall DeWeese, a wealthy resident, entertained several dozen friends at a “blossom fete” in a home decorated with thousands of fruit blossoms and lilacs. The next year his guest list passed 100. By 1910 the private party had become a public Flower Carnival with a Maypole dance, a flower queen, and music from the Cañon City High School band and the Territorial Prison band. The Cañon City Improvement League took charge in 1912 and organized a citywide cleanup each year before the visitors arrived. By 1913 the event was called the Blossom Day Celebration.

The Jaycees and the band trophies

During the First World War the League stopped promoting the event outside the city. Attendance was low, though local residents still took part. After the war the Chamber of Commerce took over sponsorship, and from 1926 to 1937 about 5,000 people came each spring. Boy Scouts served as information directors, baseball was played at the Abbey, and visitors could take an airplane ride over the orchards. In 1938 the Jaycees sponsored their first Blossom Festival, and a publicity campaign drew 8,000. The next year brought the first Band Festival Day, with bands from across the state competing for trophies. In 1940, 10,000 visitors came for a carnival, a dance at the Annex, boxing at the State Armory and the parade down Main Street.

During the Second World War the Jaycees held what they called “token” festivals with little publicity, and turnout fell well below normal. In 1948 more than 35,000 visitors came back. A photograph from 1950, held by the Royal Gorge Regional Museum & History Center, shows that year’s parade under a short caption: “Ducks travel the parade.”